Fighting the enemy was difficult, especially when you were mistaken for them.
April 5: National Go For Broke Day – Honoring the 100th Infantry Battalion / 442nd Regimental Combat Team
At the start of World War II, Japanese Americans were banned from military service. The government didn’t trust them.
They looked like the enemy.
And so instead of rifles, they were handed mops and buckets — assigned to janitorial and kitchen duty while other Americans shipped off to war.
It didn’t matter that they were born here. It didn’t matter that they pledged allegiance to the same flag. To the U.S. government, their ancestry outweighed their citizenship.
But when that same government finally allowed them to fight, they didn’t hold back.
Thousands of young Nisei men (second-generation Japanese Americans) volunteered to serve, many from behind barbed wire in U.S. incarceration camps.
Their families had been stripped of their homes and locked away.
But still, these men raised their hands and said, “I’ll fight.”
They were organized into the 100th Infantry Battalion and later the 442nd Regimental Combat Team — which merged into a single unit that would go on to fight in some of the most grueling battles of the European campaign.
They faced not just the Axis powers — but the weight of proving their loyalty to a country that had betrayed them.
They adopted a motto:
“Go For Broke” — risk everything for a single shot at victory.
And they lived up to it.
In France, they helped rescue the “Lost Battalion,” a group of 211 soldiers from a Texas unit surrounded by German forces.
To reach them, the 442nd had to fight through heavily fortified enemy lines and suffered massive casualties.
They lost over 800 men to save 211.
It was one of the most selfless and heroic acts of the war.
So many of them were wounded, the 100th Battalion became known as the “Purple Heart Battalion.”
By the end of WWII, the 100th/442nd had earned:
•Over 18,000 awards, including
•21 Medals of Honor
•4,000 Purple Hearts
•9,486 Bronze Stars
They became — and remain — the most decorated unit in U.S. military history, for its size and length of service.
But they didn’t just fight the war.
They fought racism. They fought doubt. They fought for the right to be seen as Americans.
Their legacy isn’t just medals. It’s the quiet courage of fighting for a country that questioned your right to fight at all.
Today, on Go For Broke Day, we honor the Nisei soldiers of the 100th/442nd — and the example they set for all Americans. They risked everything to prove that freedom wasn’t about ancestry. It was about action. They went for broke.
So we could remember what it means to stand for something.